


wishbound

by bioluminesce



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Ahamkara (Destiny) - Freeform, Dragon Riders, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:47:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28417851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bioluminesce/pseuds/bioluminesce
Summary: The Traveler had made Guardians to fight the Fallen and the dragons, and in turn it had created dragons of its own.
Relationships: Eriana-3 & Eris Morn, Eris Morn & Brya | Eris Morn's Ghost, Eris Morn & Ikora Rey
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9





	wishbound

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of several fics I’m forcing into existence: smaller than I had wanted, less plotty and indeed less character-based than I had expected. But at the end of the year I really wanted to push to make these things exist, to maybe be able to springboard off them or have others springboard off them later. They’re all a little rushed, a little NaNo-ish. Sketches. Several last hurrahs for this kind of siren call. But otherwise, they wouldn’t exist at all. So, I hope the imagery pleases, anyway. Dragons!!

The Ahamkara was a landscape. Eris and Brya skimmed the mountain range of spine fast, Eris’ helmet and armor insulating her from the cold, rushing wind. The Ghost she rode was nervous, her sides twitching where Eris gripped her. But this, Eris knew, was what she had been made to do. The Traveler had risen Guardians to fight the Fallen and the dragons, and in turn it had created dragons of its own: Ghosts, sapient and magical.

At a fraction of the Ahamkara’s size, Brya could skim and dodge around the head. The Cosmodrome whipped past under Eris’ feet. The violet scales fell away to a cliffside, suddenly opening up the drop to browns and greens below. Brya’s silver, horned head bobbed in front of her, her elegant, snake-like face a pleasure to watch.

White water churned over the ruined dam in the distance. No Ahamkara had come this close in recored history — too close to the city, too close to scouts, liable to spread their strange, dreaming ideas to too much of humanity. And so, Guardians did their work.

“Woo!” Eriana’s shout of pleasure crackled through Eris’ comm. Her Ghost Jax’s wide wings flared on the other side of the flying Ahamkara, then plunged. Two other Guardians harried the wish-dragon from the other side, but Eris couldn’t see them and didn’t need to coordinate with them; her job was to attack the head with Eriana.

“Time for our pass,” Brya said. Although the wind covered up most sounds, Eris could clearly hear her partner. “She’s getting in position.”

Eris squeezed the dragon’s sides with her legs and readied her bow. Long practice made balance second nature to her, but approaching the head and eyes was also the most dangerous part of an Ahamkara hunt. Away from the buffeting, eddying wings and thrashing tail, Brya tucked herself into the slipstream behind the crested head. Wide wings flapped around Eris. Some of Eriana’s enthusiasm was infectious. Other than this one incursion, the Ahamkara had been quiet lately. So had the Fallen. Humanity was, maybe, getting a foothold back on its own planet.

The crackle of Arc energy on the bow snapped near Eris’ ear. Brya started the countdown, Eris finished it, and at zero Eriana and Jax whipped over the horizon line of the Ahamkara’s head, wind snapping in his wings. Eris loosed arrow after arrow into the Ahamkara’s eyes and the soft skin around them, blinking between shots to keep her target from catching her own eye. Orange flame bloomed along the split crest; Eriana launching a rain of Solar swords. The Ahamkara screamed and lowered its head, skin blackening.

Brya easily flapped up out of the range of the larger dragon’s hunching shoulders and frantic wings. Eris rested her eyes on the distant top of the Cosmodrome wall just to stop Arc and Solar flares from blinding her. Another quick look around showed Shaxx and Wei Ning at the Ahamkara’s tail, shooting into the base of the wings to bring it down. Wei Ning plummeted from her Ghost, and even though Eris knew the maneuver, her heart caught in her throat as her friend fell.

But the fall simply let Wei Ning and her Ghost cover more ground. The Titan fired toward one wing, shredding it from free fall, while the Ghost breathed fire over the other. Just before she would have hit the Ahamkara’s scales, her Ghost transmatted Wei Ning to his back and blinked both of them out of the way of reprisal.

This is when Eris made her mistake.

Coming back to herself, ready to start her next pass, she caught the gaze of one of the Ahamkara’s many eyes. Charred skin all around it, it glowed with an eerie, wet blue.

Brya saw the mistake immediately. “Eris! Eris!”

The voice in her comm and in her head sounded far away, unimportant. Eris’ stomach dropped as she lost the rhythm of the pass, lost her tight grip on her own Ghost. Rushing no-sound, as loud and indiscriminate as wind and as soft as cotton, filled her head while she looked into that tempting eye. Why look anywhere else? What had been so important about this mission? What could be more compelling than this Ahamkara, even as it shed elevation and burned?

Eriana’s voice, dimly, irrelevantly: “If only Ikora had been here to see this.”

Why did that matter? Why did keeping her grip matter? At some point, Eris had lowered her bow. Brya wobbled back and forth beneath her, trying to keep her rider upright, speaking irritated and caring words Eris could no longer hear. Eris craned her neck to look at that eye. The voice of the Ahamkara, indescribable and familiar, rose.

She let the wish-vision take her.

* * *

Long flight back to the Tower, Brya tired and Eris picking up on her irritability. _We could call a ship_ , Eris sent.

 _There aren’t enough jumpships,_ Brya replied. _Should we really requisition one just for us?_

_It’s more comfortable. Just because you can survive in space doesn’t mean you have to do all the hard work._

Eris kept these thoughts to herself as she pushed her feet out of stirrups in the hangar. Guardians and dragons waited in a line of wings and frills and the aftermath of battle: the scent of gun oil, blood, scales. Brya wanted a bath, and Eris would give her one. For the aftermath of such a victory, celebrations were muted. None of the Vanguard had come out to meet her, and for all that she and Cayde-6 argued, she missed the ritual of seeing the Hunter leader. To busy herself instead of focusing on the thoughts, she hurried into the maze of tack rooms and armories that filled half the hangar, aiming for Brya’s supplies.

Ikora Rey stood in the wide hall, second-story latticework shadows dappling her face from the ongoing construction to fit in the growing ranks of Guardians and Ghosts.

Eris stopped, stunned by the vacant look on the usually sharp Warlock Vanguard’s face. “Ikora?”

“We should stop this.” Ikora looked down at her feet. Loneliness compounded; although the hangar outside had been crowded, there was no one here to help quiet Eris find the right comforting words Ikora so clearly needed.

“Stop what?” She approached cautiously.

“The Hunts. Trying to keep the Ahamkara out. It’s useless.” Ikora wouldn’t meet her eyes. Dirt mottled the purple edges of her robes where they brushed the ground. Something about that felt wrong, like the detail was off, but Eris couldn’t place why. When had she noticed whether or not Ikora’s robes were long enough to touch the ground?

“You seem tired,” Eris said. “Have you rested since the last Hunt? Talked to your Ghost?”

“You know I don’t speak to Ophiuchus. If I did, we’d be out there. But he was part of the solution to the puzzle. Without him, I can see more clearly how we’ll all fall apart.”

Eris’s stomach soured. She _should_ have remembered; Ikora and Ophiuchus had been estranged for years. Perhaps the Vanguard not being able to fight with her Guardians had sent Ikora into this feeling of uselessness.

“What about Cayde and Zavala? Have you talked to your fireteam?”

Ikora looked up abruptly. Where before she had been uncharacteristically docile, now she glared with uncharacteristic fury. “Something worse is coming! All this time we’ve spent on tactics against these dragons, and we don’t even know what’s coming from the Moon! Seeders first, then broods, then pincers and the massacre—!”

All of those words meant nothing. Eris reached out, hoping to at least snap Ikora out of it with a firm touch on her shoulders.

Suddenly, Brya was beside her. _It’s a dream,_ Eris knew instantly, although everything had seemed vividly real before. The Ghost couldn’t have been inside the hallway; she was too large.

“She’s right,” said Brya. “It’s no use fighting. There will just always be a next war, and a next one. I won’t be with you forever. Why love me now?”

 _Oh. This is an Ahamkara dream._ The memory of the Cosmodrome returned. _I looked too long. They want me to give up._

“That isn’t how it works!” Eris snarled. The hands she had been reaching toward Ikora now held weapons, Arc knives. They scattered toward Brya, an accidental attack that tore open the dragon’s silver skin for a terrible, inevitable moment before —

* * *

Eris woke up.

Her chest ached, and the sensation of flying limp dizzied her. She was slumped over Brya’s neck, her nose full of the smell of scale dust and warm blood. She groaned and sat up. The Cosmodrome wall loomed below her, then passed behind and out of sight as Brya flew. The dragon moved gently up and down beneath Eris’ limp legs.

“Are you awake?” Brya sent, plaintive.

“I’m here.” Eris resettled her seat, checked her helmet seals, and took a deep breath before looking around. The wreckage of the Ahamkara’s body was spread out across the Cosmodrome behind her, the other Guardians’ dragons visible hovering as Brya came around.

“You fought your way out. Not all Guardians are so lucky, you know. You must have wanted to come back.”

Eris patted the silver scales beside her. “I knew you wouldn’t act like that. You or Ikora. You were so hopeless in the dream.”

“And what have we learned?” Brya sounded happy.

“Practice avoiding their eyes even more.”

“Right. We’ll get it, yet. Can’t let those Titans and Warlocks have all the fun.”

“There’s something else.”

Brya started to descend to where the others were standing. This close, Eris could see Eriana rubbing Jax’s nose, Wei Ning and Shaxx wrestling each other and shouting with what remained of their adrenaline. The Ahamkara’s skin was graying and flaking already, all of its eyes obscured and dim, one wing charred to the bone. Smoke and the smell of rotting meat rose from it.

Eris spoke fast, wanting to get all of the words out before they descended to a height where anyone else would hear. Although she welcomed the embrace Eriana was sure to offer after her victory, she had a strange certainty, like left over dream-logic, that part of what she had seen was information best doled out carefully. “The Ahamkara told me, through Ikora in the dream, that some other kind of threat was coming”

“What?” Brya landed, back feet and front, tucked her wings, and leaned forward for Eris to slide off the saddle. Almost as soon as she did Eriana ducked around the dragon’s neck with the ease of long friendship and threw her arms around Eris’ shoulders. Eris enjoyed the warmth of her friend’s embrace, but did not know where to go from here. How much credence should she give the dragon’s vision? None. Everyone cautioned so. But the one true part of it — Ikora and Ophiuchus _were_ estranged — made the rest feel more immediate.

“Wait.” Eris held Eriana to arm’s length.

The two Guardians and the dragon looked back and forth to one another, waiting indeed, but for a pronouncement Eris did not want to speak.

“I need to talk to Ikora,” Eris said. “There’s something coming. Something on the Moon. The Ahamkara told me.”

“Be careful with those visions,” Eriana said. “You know that. But tell her. It might explain why this one came so close to the wall.”

“Because it wanted to warn us?”

“Whatever Ahamkara want, you still can’t trust them,” Eriana said.

The boisterous sounds of the Titans rose behind Brya, banishing some of what remained of Eris’ doomsaying mood.

Eris nodded. Eriana’s expression held a whole conversation: _Quiet Eris, I’ll listen if you speak. Just tell me when. I want this victory to be yours, too. None of us think you failed._

But still there was an unspoken taboo when it came to Ahamkara visions. No Guardian ever really wanted to talk about what they had seen.

Still, Eris gave a small smile that reassured Eriana enough.Even as she felt badly for sending her friend away, she was reassured that in time she would be able to explain the vision better. Back at the Tower, maybe, when she was no longer looking at the crumbling body of the thing that had stolen her mind, she would be able to express it more clearly.

“How are you holding up?” Brya sent. Behind her, other Ghosts roared and chattered.

Still shaken, Eris leaned against Brya’s leg, happy for the give-and-take of her Ghost’s comfort, and watched her friends enjoy their victory. Brya folded a wing over her. “We won,” Eris said. “For now.”


End file.
